The Atonement and Other Stories

By Louis Auchincloss

Gaze into the lives of the twentieth century’s wealthy and declining WASP establishment in these twelve stories by the author of The Education of Oscar Fairfax.

No one else writes about the moral life of America’s moneyed class with anything approaching Louis Auchincloss’s understanding, sympathy, irony, and humor. In this, his first book of short fiction since the acclaimed Collected Stories, he again brings us news that no other writer can deliver, news about how America’s great families and fortunes are run and the axes and crises on which they turn. Here is how the privileged view their privilege—some with smugness, some with style, some with a crushing sense of civic and personal responsibility. Here is how the rich marry, how they divorce, and, more important, why. Here, definitively and indelibly, is the eastern seaboard’s Wasp establishment—sometimes in its glory, more often in its decline, and always with its values, assumptions, and increasingly fragile sense of self held up for our scrutiny by a master, the most subtle critic of American manners since Edith Wharton.

Praise for The Atonement and Other Stories

“The 12 stories collected in “The Atonement” reveal a writer at, or very near, the top of his form.” —Los Angeles Times

“In this PC world, Auchincloss’ crisp, confident tales of the WASP elite almost qualify as guilty pleasures. These 12 stories . . . will satisfy longtime fans and initiates alike with their portraits of investment bankers, lawyers, and socialites testing the limits of silver-plated social niches . . . . As usual, Auchincloss etches out the moral dilemmas of the blue-chip social stratum with reassuring clarity. A” —Entertainment Weekly

“Fragile, often smug, and sometimes silly characters populate this noteworthy collection . . . . these glimpses of the Eastern elite’s manners and moral quandaries will provide an accessible first taste for the Auchincloss novice and an enjoyable read for longtime fans.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 19, 1997
• ISBN: 9780547971155

Louis Auchincloss

Louis Auchincloss was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.

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Copyright © 1997 by Louis Auchincloss

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Auchincloss, Louis.

The atonement, and other stories / Louis Auchincloss.

p. cm.

Contents: The atonement—Ars gratia artis—The last great divorce—The Maenads—The foursome—Lear’s shadow—The hidden muse—Realist in Babylon—Geraldine

ISBN 0-395-86826-2

1. Rich people—United States—Social life and customs—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3501.U25A9 1997

813'.54—dc21 97-14570 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-97115-5

v2.0421

FOR

ED AND EVY HALPERT

The Atonement

SANDY TREMAIN had a pardonable vanity about his good looks; they expressed the amiability of character and equanimity of temper that had been his valued trademarks for a near half-century of life. Of course, as everyone was always saying in the early 1980s, people were living longer; one’s middle forties were really almost a part of youth. And he had lost none of his silky brown hair; the few wisps of grey could be passed off as distinguished. But if he weighed only ten pounds more than a decade back, it was also true that his creamy skin was not quite so creamy and that the luster of youth which had once so illumined his features that friends had joked of a movie career, was now only a cherished memory. Oh, he was still well enough—far above the average indeed—and he was fully aware that his grey-blue, amicably gazing eyes inspired both trust and affection and that the easy movements of his lissome, well-coordinated and well-clad limbs were the admiration at least of female observers. Sandy knew that he could always count on his charm, the charm of a seemingly controlled laziness, or rather of a seeming laziness that was really a mask, but a mask put on not to deceive but to reassure, to allay anxiety, to make people as comfortable as they should be—why not? His demeanor put the world on notice that it could relax, because there was nothing to be gained by being on edge, because, whatever tumble lay ahead, one would break fewer bones in a graceful spill. And at least one would not have looked a fool.

But why, he found he was now irritably asking himself, did it always have to be his role to put people at their ease? Was it a must that he should maintain forever the image he had once created of the wizard investment banker who made money as easily as he spent it and who scorned the vulgar habit of touting his work hours? Why was it incumbent on him to play the lead in a parlor comedy, night after night? Who had written the play? Who was even directing it?

That objects which seemed to glitter in the shop window should lose half their gloss when taken home was a truism of which he had no need to be reminded, but now even the shop window had lost its sheen. Take the penthouse into which he and Amanda and the two girls had just moved. Thirty-three stories above East Fiftieth Street, it commanded a 360-degree view of the city through huge glass panes opening on a terrace that surrounded it like a moat. Shaving in his bathroom, Sandy could look north to the George Washington Bridge and infinite stretches of the Bronx; Queens and the East River greeted him from the french windows of the drawing room; the Verrazzano and Staten Island were seen from the dining hall; the mighty Hudson rolled before Amanda’s boudoir to the West. To contrast with the modernity of the panorama, the décor was antique and choice: a Louis XV parlor, an Inigo Jones library. Yet this majestical roof fretted with golden fire was no more to Hamlet-Sandy than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. He felt like the mad Ludwig of Bavaria, who had dotted the countryside with his crazy castles to make the world seem something it wasn’t.

At breakfast, on a weekday morning, his daughters, Kay and Elise, thirteen and fourteen, large, pale-faced, with long blond hair parted in the middle, their eyes solemnly fixed on nothing, were silently eating cereal. Sandy had to remind himself that at their ages one could tell little of their future; they might yet be beauties. Amanda, who always rose in time for the meal, was still in her dressing gown, but it was the beautiful kimono that he had brought her from a business trip to Tokyo. It looked very well on her; she had a figure for clothes. But she was sipping her coffee too audibly as she studied what he assumed was the editorial page of the Times to cull her opinions for the day. Amanda prided herself on having moved to the left of her admired father’s extreme right wing; she was a fan of Adlai Stevenson. She had met the former Illinois governor and been charmed by him. She was very proud of that. She talked a lot about it.

And why, pray, was he having such snippy thoughts? Was she not exactly the wife he had expected she would be, sixteen years back? Perhaps the filling out of her round cheeks had made her dark eyes seem closer together; maybe her abundant black, stiffly curled hair gave her a bit of an air of rigidity, of premature middle-age set, but she was still a fine-looking woman at forty-one, and she was as brisk and enthusiastic as ever. More so.

Yes, that was it: too eager, too avid, too quick to extol the many blessings she had never questioned. It was not that he hadn’t suspected, in the core of his wife’s being, a hidden panic that she might be deprived of some of the glittering externals of her life if she did not keep crying out her appreciation, that the Santa who had regularly visited her hearth from earliest childhood might be capable of bounding back down the chimney and snatching away his toys. But in the past year she had seemed to have laid that old ghost, if indeed it had ever haunted her. She now appeared to take even her beloved husband for granted. Sometimes at night when he wanted to make love, she, who had once been so eager, would object: Heavens, what’s got into you, bozo? We did it the night before last. Do you mind terribly if I slip off to sleep?

Had the world of her lunches at the Colony Club, her charitable committees, the Kip School fund, of which she was chairman, her constant calls on her mother and aunts, begun to take precedence over love? And why should he resent it if it had? Was he such a Romeo?

But she was not, after all, reading the editorial page. She suddenly folded the paper and looked down the table at him with an air of disgust. Oh, Sandy, here’s another of those terrible cases!

What cases?

Another of these insider traders. Really, one begins to wonder if any of the firms are free of it.

Are you beginning to wonder about mine, my dear?

No, of course not. But don’t you think something must have happened to our moral standards when there are so many of them? What is this consuming greed? Where does it come from?

Your father says they’re all Jews.

Oh, Father. Well, you know how he is. We needn’t go into that. Of course, it does seem odd that so many of the men indicted are . . .

Elise interrupted her. Ellie Kneller’s uncle was indicted, and he’s Jewish. But Miss Pringle says it’s unfair to make a point of that.

And Miss Pringle’s quite right, Amanda agreed hastily. And speaking of her, it’s time you girls were off to school.

Sandy submitted benignly to the demonstrative osculations of his daughters and watched them as they left the room. But he had no intention of dropping the subject.

"You know, it wasn’t so long ago, Amanda, that any cautious investor, even a fiduciary, was expected to use all the inside information he could get his hands on. It was even considered a duty when he was acting for others. The only odium incurred was by men who listened at keyholes or opened other people’s mail. I remember the story of your maternal grandfather, who discovered that a man in his office was sweet-talking his secretary into letting him peek at her boss’s market orders. So he kept secret the big sale of a stock he had reason to believe would nose-dive. How he must have chuckled when the poor sneak lost his shirt!"

Amanda looked puzzled. Was he criticizing her ancestor? Her family had always revered Grandpa Burrill, a tough old trader of the twenties and thirties, and they disliked any comparison of him with what they called the whiz kids of the current market. She, of course, had married a whiz kid and had accepted the compensations, and she tried to be fair about it. Oh, yes, Sandy conceded, she really did try! But he still suspected that she had never been able to convince herself that his earnings were quite the same, quite as solid, as Burrill money.

Well, didn’t the man deserve it? she demanded. No gentleman would flirt with a secretary to find out things he wasn’t supposed to know.

I agree. But a gentleman like your grandfather might have obtained his own information as a member of one of those secret pools he was so adept at organizing which would trade a stock up to a dizzy price and sell out just before its inevitable crash.

And wasn’t that ordinary business, in those days? Wasn’t it simply being smarter than the next guy? Wasn’t it what free enterprise was all about?

He smiled. A good definition, perhaps. And now, presumably, it isn’t free anymore.

Amanda’s brow was still puckered. What are you trying to tell me, darling? That there are laws today that make it illegal to do what it was perfectly legal to do in the past? Isn’t that obvious?

But your tone, my dear, implied that you were talking more about morals than law. The moral issues are not always so clear. The law tries to put all investors on an equal footing. That may be commendable. But isn’t it always true that one man is better equipped to make a choice of securities than another?

Well, you can’t expect lawmakers to equalize brain power!

No. They’re trying to establish an objective standard of what does and what does not constitute privileged knowledge. The rules, as always, seem arbitrary. A cautious man does not consult his conscience as to whether he may make use of a particular piece of information. He had much better consult a lawyer.

I don’t see what you’re getting at.

Simply, my dear, that you are making stringent moral judgments in matters that are not quite so clear to others. Take this case, for example. Suppose I suspect my partner of using insider knowledge in purchasing the stock of Company X.

"Have you suspected one of your partners?"

How like a woman at once to reject the hypothetical! No, I suspect no one. But let us say in my example that my firm has been retained to finance the take-over of Company X by Company Y.

One of your raids. Amanda’s lips were pursed in faint distaste. Her father deplored such things.

Exactly. A hostile take-over. Very hush-hush. The moment the tender offer is made, the stock of Company X will soar.

Why? Isn’t it the victim?

But the tender offer will be higher than the market price. Our firm, however, is legally forbidden to buy. But take that partner I said I suspected. Say I have a hunch he’s buying up X stock and keeping it in the name of a friend. What we call ‘parking’ the shares. What should I do?

Well, isn’t it clear? Go to the partner and tell him to stop!

But, Amanda, my dear, he’d simply laugh at me! Of course, he’d deny the whole thing. And the parking friend, if I pushed the matter so far, would assure me he was buying the stock on his own account.

Couldn’t you go to the police?

"You mean to the Securities and Exchange Commission? Or even to the United States attorney? I could do that. It might be difficult to prove. But suppose I could prove it. What would be the result? A partner disgraced and perhaps jailed. Our firm suspended from trading and possibly bankrupted. Myself impoverished and no doubt reviled in Wall Street as a whistle blower. Haven’t I paid a rather stiff price for my squeamishness?"

Amanda was giving him her total attention now. I suppose if the situation became too painful, you could always resign from the firm.

And live on your money?

You know, darling, you’re always welcome to it.

We’d have to go begging to your parents.

Sandy, you’re talking nonsense! What makes you think you couldn’t get another job?

He felt with a sudden grimness that she was slipping from his trap. He reached almost fiercely to pull her back. But not one where I’d be making the kind of money I’m making now. Where would your school pledge be?

Amanda was chairman of the board of her and the girls’ school, Kip, once more elegantly known as Miss Kip’s Classes. She was heading the drive for the renovation of the building, to which Sandy had pledged half a million. Her features drooped.

Would we have to renege?

Most certainly. But that’s only half the story. We are on the verge of a boom market the like of which has never been seen. If I stick where I am, I may very well in a couple of years be able to raise that pledge substantially.

Amanda allowed her mouth to gape. How substantially?

Maybe to a million.

Oh, Sandy! The mist of their discussion of morals had melted away before this vision of a glittering city of golden turrets under the bluest of skys. And of course you said this whole business of the partner was only a supposition?

She stared at him, but he would not answer her. He could only smile at how desperately she reached for the edges of the tent of hypothesis that she had so rashly collapsed and endeavored to pull it up again.

Of course it was! she replied for him. How silly of me; how like a woman, as you said, to take things literally. And I should remember what Daddy told me about a wife not interfering in her husband’s business matters. She glanced at her watch. I must get dressed. I’m due at the dentist at nine.

She hurried from the room, leaving him to wonder what else he might have told her had the crazy mood lasted.

…

Sandy had furnished his office at Monroe Ritter & Co. as differently as possible from the trading rooms and other spaces of the firm, and his door was always closed to muffle the mellifluous hum of the business machines. In what he liked to think of as his carved niche of tranquillity amidst the chaos of market transactions, his chairs were English Regency, his desk a huge boule table, and his walls were arrayed with five master drawings of the Italian Renaissance, the principal one a portrait sketch of the strong, knobby features of Leo X, who had exclaimed, like a true Medici: God gave us the papacy; let us enjoy it!

That morning, on entering, he picked up his telephone and told his secretary to ask Mr. Brandt please to come in as soon as he arrived.

He then sat down to his mail, already sorted and opened in a neat pile before him. But he reached for none of it. His attention was fixed on the silver-framed photograph of Lenny Brandt to the left of his blotter. It was larger than the one of Amanda and the girls to the right. It depicted Lenny’s big stocky figure and broad grinning face in a triumphant pose, rifle in hand, over the carcass of a Cape buffalo.

It was perhaps slightly odd to keep on one’s desk the likeness of a partner whose office was only two doors down the corridor. It was perhaps equally odd that there should be on Lenny’s desk a photograph of Sandy on a pier by the body of a suspended tarpon. No doubt an occasional office boy made smutty speculations on the relationship of the two. But Sandy made it a point to himself to emphasize openly the role that Lenny had played in his life. Lenny had been his closest friend since Yale; Lenny had introduced him to the active life and the active mind; Lenny had lured him from his law firm and initiated him into investment banking. Lenny had damned him.

He was different from any friend Sandy had had before. To begin with, he was Jewish, though his rather butch blond looks suggested another ethnic origin. There was, however, the occasional gleam of an eagle in his small, sparkling, grey-green eyes and aquiline nose which might warn a keen observer that here was a much more complicated character than the rather coarsely joking and sports-loving individual who presented himself with such easy, near-arrogant assurance. Lenny’s family were related to the great German-Jewish banking clans of Manhattan, but they had had reverses, and what money was left, in his Yale days, though artfully spent for the best show, had been strictly limited. The Brandts were not Orthodox, and Lenny himself was a cheerfully avowed atheist, but he was also extremely proud, and quick to resent the smallest hint of anti-Semitism, with which at college he had had some experience.

He was an existentialist, as well. He believed that a man was wholly in charge of his own destiny and responsible to no one but himself. As a boy he had suffered from rheumatic fever, but had rigorously trained himself to be a football player at high school and at Yale. In this he liked to compare himself to Theodore Roosevelt, who had found his manhood in the West, but he scornfully rejected the twenty-sixth President’s sentimental moralism, which Lenny claimed was only the mask of a superior ego. He stoutly maintained that people who professed to live for others did more harm than good and that the great deeds of history, like the great works of art, were the results of enlightened self-interest.

Lenny at Yale had had, or at least had shown, no interest in penetrating the smart prep school crowd of which Sandy had been a natural leader, but Sandy, without in any way resenting it—indeed, being rather flattered by it—suspected Lenny of wanting to show the world—or himself—that he could pluck the juiciest apple off that still green but already withering tree. Lenny could never bear to concede that anything was beyond his reach; he had to prove to himself that he could become the best friend of the most socially eligible member of the class. He did not want Sandy’s friends or Sandy’s fraternity or even, ultimately, Sandy’s senior society. Sandy’s head alone, so to speak, on his watch chain would suffice. Which did not mean, either, that he and Sandy would not be the best and truest of friends. They had been. Presumably they still were.

The door opened, and Lenny stood there. He did not enter, but waved a hand in a cheerful salute. What’s up?

Come in, please, Lenny, and sit down. I have something serious to tell you.

Lenny, expressionless, walked slowly to the seat before the desk and eased himself into it. For a moment he looked gravely at his partner. Then his lips parted in a small, perfunctory smile. You want out.

Out of what?

Out of our little game, of course. What else?

How in God’s name did you know that?

It’s written all over you. You’ve been stewing about it for weeks.

How have I shown it?

Well, not to everyone. But, my friend, I read you like a THE ATONEMENT book. You WASP intellectuals like to kid yourselves you’ve got away from your puritan heritage. But you never do. You’ve got a conscience like the chain on Marley’s ghost.

And you haven’t?

Not one like that, anyway. Because it’s basically the kind of thing I live for. The game. The sport. It’s a bullfight, man. You’re out there with a red rag between yourself and the raging beast.

And yet you’re always telling me it’s so safe!

"We try to make it safe. That’s the game."

Sandy gazed curiously at his partner’s square strong face. Except for the nose, the features were rounded and hard. Yet the eyes had a hint of friendliness, just perceptible behind the guardedness, the suspiciousness. A bullfight? Was that it? Because a man risked his life, did it have to be a man’s game? Was that really enough for Lenny?

You sleep at night, then?

Tessie tells me I even snore.

No bad dreams?

Look, Sandy. My father was a good man. None gooder. You know how his father lost our share of the Brandt fortune. But it wasn’t enough for my old man to start out without a penny. Oh, no. He had to take on Grandpa’s debts. Every fucking one of them. And he spent a good part of his working life paying them off—paying off a bunch of usurers who were little better than crooks. Eventually he got out from under and made a little dough for himself and his family. But nothing to what he would have, had he not been such a white knight. And who really paid for his high morals? His wife and kids. When we were on scholarships, wearing hand-me-downs, my poor thirsty ma wasn’t even allowed a cocktail before dinner. ‘While we accept help in tuition, we can have no liquor in the house’ was Pa’s pious precept. I tell you, there were times when I actually hated the guy!

Sandy, of course, knew all about old Mr. Brandt. Lenny had talked obsessively about him. But you haven’t been bad, surely, just because your father was good?

The twinkle in Lenny’s eyes was extinguished by a momentary glare. So it’s bad and good now, we’ve come to that.

Oh, yes, very bad. Wicked, if you like.

Words, words, Hamlet.

Tell me something, Lenny. What’s your real goal? You don’t spend it all, the way I do.

No, I haven’t a society wife.

You thank your lucky stars for that?

Not necessarily. I like Amanda. I even forgive her that ‘some of my best friends are Jews’ attitude. I can see she tries, which is more than so many of her class do. It’s true I put my money away. Most of it, anyway. Oh, I buy Tessie everything she wants, but she’s a reasonable girl. And of course I like spiffy foreign cars and my little shooting spot in Georgia. But I could swing all that, and more, and still be legit. Frankly, Sandy, I don’t quite know what I’m after. I sometimes get a dark little feeling that I shan’t keep it long anyway, so there’s one solution. But you were speaking about dreams. I do have some.

Sandy shuddered. So do I.

But Lenny for once seemed more interested in his own reactions. I sometimes feel I might be like the great Schliemann. He made a fortune, mostly in Russia, I believe, and not too scrupulously, either, so that he could finance his excavations in Troy and Mycenae. Well, you may hear someday Leonard Brandt has dived to the bottom of the ocean to bring up the lost island of Atlantis.

Sandy was struck. I’d like to think that. That you might be able to make up for what we’ve done.

Hell, no. I’m making up for nothing.

Well, I’m still through. I mean it, Lenny.

Lenny stared. You’re not thinking of leaving the firm!

Sandy shook his head. No. At least I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. I mean I’m through with what you like to call our little game.

Lenny was silent for a moment. His face told nothing. But he was used to crises and dealing with them. At last he nodded. Very well. But what about the Ruark shares?

You keep them.

Half are yours, Sandy.

I don’t want them. Save them for Atlantis.

I’ll hold them for you in a kind of trust. Your kids may need them someday.

Sandy shrugged, and Lenny embarked on a final plea. Look, Sandy, you know everyone does it!

Sandy jumped to his feet at this. I do not! Do you think a single one of our thirty-eight partners does?

Lenny rolled his eyes to the ceiling. "Oh, I imagine Tim Doyle uses a few tips now and then. And I can’t think that Max Segal lets all his opportunities slip by."

"And that’s all you can mention? Two?